STRAIGHT-OUT-OF-CAMERA IS JUST TOO DAMN LAZY

MAY 2, 2025

                                       FINAL IMAGE OF A CONSERVATORY AT A GARDEN FRAN AND I VISITED LAST WEEK. THE LAST OF DOZENS OF SHOTS I TOOK THAT DAY. YES, IT IS KIND OF PERVERSE TO TAKE BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES OF SPRING FLOWERS, BUT WHAT CAN I SAY?

This week I would like to take a stand against the popular notion that there is something purer about just ignoring the power of post-processing and sticking to your results achieved at the moment you snapped the shutter on your camera. This “straight-out-of-camera” ethos has taken hold for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad, but I believe that it is based on several falsehoods and cedes back too much power to your camera. My title for this essay might be deliberately provocative, but let us take a look at one image that I think proves my point.

                                                                  ONE OF MY TYPICAL "GRAB" SHOTS WHEN MY WIFE HAS SAID IT WAS TIME TO GO MINUTES BEFORE I TOOK THE SHOT.. I WAS INTRIGUED BY THE GLOW OF THE CONSERVATORY IN THE MIDST OF DARKER FOLIAGE, BUT OBVIOUSLY CARELESS ENOUGH TO NOT EVEN MAKE A COMPOSITION THAT WAS INTERESTING, MUCH LESS STRAIGHT.

I never sat in an office all day working with a computer. I can understand that those who were chained to a digital “helper” might not want to duplicate this relationship once they got home and tried to enjoy their photographic hobby. The operative word is “enjoy”, and I would never tell a hobbyist to sit down and suffer over an image. If you do not want to enhance your images with just a few mouse clicks, that’s alright with me. Just don’t adopt the attitude that your refusal to do so makes your imagery somehow “purer” than a carefully considered enhancement of your original snapshot.

This attitude ignores the history of photography, where almost all of the most admired images ever exhibited were the clear result of manipulations, large and small, done in the darkroom. The original confusion was the elevation of documentary photography, especially photo journalism, to the heights of the critical discussion of all photography.  I believe that the search for the “truth” in an image both denigrated and ignored the real power of photojournalism. The fact is that the heroism involved in actually witnessing historical events with a camera so overpowered aesthetic considerations that it was easy to insist that no manipulation of an image was to be allowed. This ideology persists today, even when "deep fakes” call into question the entire meaning of truth in photo images.

                                                                  I'VE CHANGED THE FLAVOR OF FUJI'S BLACK AND WHITE FILM SIMULATION. DON'T BEAT YOURSELF IF YOU CAN'T REALLY SEE MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE, BECAUSE IT IS VERY SUBTLE. THERE IS JUST A LITTLE MORE "GLOW" IN THE CONSERVATORY. IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, THE "CULT OF FUJI" HAS NOW PRODUCED HUNDREDS OF THESE FILM SIMULATIONS THAT ALLOW PHOTOGRAPHERS TO INSIST THAT THEY ARE NOT MANIPULATING THEIR IMAGES BECAUSE THEIR CAMERA IS DOING THE JOB.

Now it is one thing to shoot for the New York Times, but it is another when you are merely pursuing your art. Everyone has a certain “red line” that they will not cross in the digital darkroom. Some of the “straight-out-of-camera” ethos evolved from the obvious distortions of the first forays into post-processing - which are frequently duplicated every time a beginner tries their hand at moving those all-too-overwhelming sliders. It is incredibly easy to g o way overboard, and some very good advice has always been to return to an image the next day when it is very easy to see that you have gone too far. This natural tendency is only compounded by the never-ending search for “likes” on social media. In an age where any image on your phone must leap out from a million other images every day, it’s a miracle if your mother even notices your work. Thus the various efforts industry-wide to sanction oversaturated, overworked, and downright manipulations of the scenes in front of the camera in a vain effort to be noticed.

                                                                  STRAIGHT-OUT-OF-LIGHTROOM HAS A LEAST FINALLY STRAIGHTENED OUT THE COMPOSITION. IS THERE SOMETHING "PURE" ABOUT A WONKY HORIZON LINE?

The real “truth” about post-processing is that the photographer has failed if the audience has realized that something is not up. The goal is not to fool anyone, but to deliver an image that is enhanced without losing any reasonable relationship with reality. There is a wavering line between photography and “photo imagery”, but like pornography, you know it when you see it. Are those colors outside of any known natural palette? Is that Moon so large that the Earth is about to be destroyed? Maybe removal of some trash in the foreground is OK, but what is that dinosaur doing over there?

                                      NEVER, NEVER CROP YOUR PHOTOS. IF YOU MISSED IT IN CAMERA, JUST SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES. PLEASE JUST GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE.

The ultimate fallacy of the “straight-out-of-camera” ethos is that it ignores the manipulations that your own camera goes through in delivering that JPEG that you consider “purer” than your own post-processing. A RAW file is a pure digital negative, whose objective is to render every piece of digital information that your camera has captured. It is so objectively “flat” that camera makers quickly realized that consumers would be appalled if they thought that was all their  camera could deliver. Thus even the image on the back of your camera that appears when you are shooting in RAW is actually a JPEG! You only see the actual RAW file when you open it up in Lightroom on your computer.

                                      THE FINAL BLACK AND WHITE IMAGE. JUDICIOUS EXPOSURE ADJUSTMENTS BOTH WITHIN AND OUTSIDE OF THE CONSERVATORY HAVE FINALLY DELIVERED THE IMAGE I WAS AFTER - A GLOWING GARDEN STRUCTURE IN THE MIDST OF DARKER VEGETATION. I BELIEVE THE IMAGE IS STILL "REALISTIC." AND IF WE ARE GOING TO ARGUE AGAINST "ABSTRACTION" IN THE FACE OF "TRUTH" THEN WHY ARE WE ACCEPTING BLACK AND WHITE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

                                      IF YOU WERE WONDERING WHAT THE "TRUTH" LOOKED LIKE, HERE IT IS. MOST OF THE SAME MANIPULATIONS WERE DONE TO THE COLOR VERSION, BUT IT IS NOT AS SATISFYING TO AT LEAST THIS VIEWER. I CAN'T GET RID OF THE GREEN COLOR CAST, WHICH IS VERY UNDERSTANDABLE IN SINCE THE OVERALL SCENE IS SO GREEN. THE COLOR CONTRAST IN THE COLOR VERSION SEEM TO FIGHT WITH THE CONTRASTS IN LIGHTING THAT I WAS MORE INTERESTED IN WHEN I VIEWED THE SCENE.

The idea that the camera’s JPEG is sufficient, or even better than what you can achieve yourself with a few keystrokes and a modicum of education and experience, is fundamentally absurd. Even my new-old Fuji, with the ability to “create” dozens of “film looks” in camera, does not have anywhere the computing power of my average Mac laptop. While my Fuji can allow me to see and shoot in half a dozen flavors of black and white “in camera”, I hope that you can see that just a few minutes and a few keystrokes deliver a far closer image to the one I had in mind out in the field. You don’t have to agree, you don’t have to even understand what I was after, to see that the final product was certainly different than what I saw when I pushed the shutter - and in my humble opinion, more than worth the trouble.